The damn foot draggers and obstructors of progress are always caviling about dams being build on fault lines. What if they break?! What about the people downstream?! And the damn progress at any price people pooh pooh, pooh pooh. Well damn! Dams on faults are an e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s problem.

China mobilized 30,000 additional soldiers to the earthquake-shattered expanses of the nation’s southwestern regions on Wednesday — not just to help victims, but also to shore up weakened dams and other elements of the infrastructure whose failure could compound the disaster.

Experts said that these dams were built around the well-recognized Longmen Shan fault. They warned that such dams might have sustained damage that could cause them to fail even weeks later.

Much depends on efforts to reduce the menacing pressure of water behind the dam walls. Two thousand soldiers were sent to a dam just three miles upriver from the devastated town of Dujiangyan, northwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu, to inspect a structure that has shown some cracks and is “in great danger,” according to state-controlled China National Radio.

Weakened Dams